# Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander

> Space strategy RPG with base building, tactical combat, and crew management. (iPhone/iPad app by Massive Damage, Inc..)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/halcyon-6-starbase-commander/id1264707038 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Massive Damage, Inc.](https://appshunter.io/developer/431638777)
- Category: Games
- Price: $6.99
- Rating: 4.44/5 from 832 App Store ratings · 50 written reviews indexed
- Age rating: 12+
- Requires: iOS 10.0 · 1.2 GB
- Languages: English
- Released: 2017-10-19
- Data updated: 2026-06-10
- Monetization: paid
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/halcyon-6-starbase-commander/id1264707038/reviews.md

## What is Halcyon 6?

*** App Store Game Of The Day ***
*** Winner Best PC Game - DIGI Awards 2016 ***
*** Runner Up Best Indie Game - CVGAs 2016 ***

An epic space strategy RPG with base building, deep tactical combat, crew management, alien diplomacy, and emergent storytelling. 
This Lightspeed Edition is a massively enhanced version of the Award Winning indie strategy RPG, Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander.

About Halcyon 6
=============
On the edge of Terran space lies Halcyon 6, a derelict starbase left behind by a mysterious precursor race. Your mission is to reclaim the derelict station and rebuild it.A mysterious alien force is making a beeline towards Earth and this starbase is the best chance for the New Terran Federation to establish new alliances, research new technologies and otherwise figure out a way to stop the impending invasion.

Using only the resources you can salvage from the derelict station and gathered from nearby star systems, it’s up to you to rebuild the starbase to lead the Terran Republic’s scientific research, exploration and diplomatic efforts on the edge of known space.

Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition is a passion project whose design is inspired by our years spent playing classic games like Star Control, Master of Orion, X-COM, Civilization and new classics like FTL.

Features:

- Base Building: spend resources to build station facilities (rooms) to enhance your production and technological capabilities, or build ships to help you control more territory

- Exploration: assign your fleets to nearby star clusters, where they can handle emerging enemy threats, do missions for alien factions or secure bonus resources

- Crew Management: assign crew to station facilities to greatly improve their output efficiency, or to ships where they can contribute in unique ways to combat, missions and events

- Deep Tactical Combat: fight tactical ship or ground battles to resolve hostile events, create a foothold in the sector and ultimately defeat the enemy mothership!

- Story Events: based on game criteria like rooms-built, alien diplomacy scores or officer traits/skills, the game will produce story events (often with multiple choice outcomes) that can lead to combat, time-related applied bonuses/negatives, officer attribute changes or any number of crazy in-game stories.

LIGHTSPEED EDITION
================
Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition brings together the original Halcyon 6 base game along with all of the additional content (Combat & Customization, Diplomatic Diversions, Loot’em Up, and Morale Booster updates) released since launch in Sept 2016 as well as brand new Lightspeed Edition optimizations and features as follows:

Streamlined Campaign
- Greatly speeds up progression and tightens the campaign to an action and adventure packed 12 hrs depending on your play style and pace

Streamlined All Systems
- For faster progression, including economy, starbase, resources, and officer levelling.
New Officer Progression System
With 6 subclasses, 3 Prestige classes, new skill tree, and over 20+ new Prestige/Epic powers.

New Ship Loadout and Config Screen
- Will let you customize loadouts (and save them) for your ships just before entering combat

New Difficulty Mode
- Called Vice Admiral and slightly increased difficulty across the board

Enhanced Combat
- Includes 25+ new alien faction space combat abilities, more combos for both players and enemies, increased faction weaknesses and resistances, and other balancing tweaks

New UI Overhaul
- Designed for greater readability and usability. Many many UI quality of life enhancements to all areas of the game, too many to list here.

## Key features

- Base building
- Exploration
- Crew management
- Deep tactical combat
- Story events
- Streamlined campaign

## What do users think of Halcyon 6?

Overall sentiment: positive

**Pros**

- 🚀 Engaging gameplay
- 👍 Immersive story and characters
- 💡 Unique blend of strategy and tactics
- 🚀 Satisfying combat system
- 👍 Retro art style and music

**Cons**

- 🐛 Frequent crashes and performance issues
- 🔍 Unintuitive user interface
- 🔍 Difficulty selecting actions due to overlapping UI elements
- 🔋 Slow performance on older devices

**Commonly reported bugs**

- Inability to return fleet to starbase
- Leveling issues with preset officers
- Force targeting skill freezing the game
- Saved game corruption and data loss

**Most requested features**

- Optimization for newer iPhone models
- More frequent updates and bug fixes
- Additional content and story expansions
- Customization options for UI and controls

## Recent user reviews (10 of 50)

All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/halcyon-6-starbase-commander/id1264707038/reviews.md

### 3/5 — Really Had Me For a Bit

*2022-08-31, version 1.4.2.6*

My first attempt taught me a lot about what is important.  Second way through I hit my stride and began to really enjoy the game - in that sweet spot where I couldn’t put it down.  But then, just as I was smooth sailing, I got walloped by an unexpected invasion.  I really didn’t see what I had done wrong and honestly am not interested enough to spend any more time figuring out the dev’s complex shenanigans.

### 5/5 — Oldie but a goodie

*2021-10-11, version 1.4.2.6*

This game is 5 years old, but a breath of fresh air amongst freemium or microtransaction types of games. I play on iPhone 12 and for me the screen size is sufficient. Only sometimes you are trying to press an icon and it isn’t registering easily but it’s easy to work around it. Well worth the low cost.

### 5/5 — XS Max Playability

*2021-06-04, version 1.4.2.6*

To the people who think that this game is “unplayable” due to the age and new IOS(plural) and New Phones, you are completely incorrect. I never write reviews but after seeing the reviews calling the developers scammers, I decided to leave a remark. I have recently started playing this game on the PC however I plan on taking a trip without my PC so I wanted to be able to play this Mobile, my expectations were low because of the prior reviews. I was blown away it is completely compatible for this iOS and for the XS max, it may not be the most beautiful graphics but do not let this unique art style drive you away. Wonderful mechanics albeit, not perfect defintely a bit touchy at times however, if you have played the PC version you will climb up the metaphorical learning curve very quickly.

### 5/5 — Very cool

*2021-04-21, version 1.4.2.6*

I’m looking forward to a long love affair with this game.  Only been playing for a day now, but I love the genre, the snarky wit, and the way options are presented in every facet of the game.

You’ve probably noticed the negative reviews based on UI problems selecting the right button.  I can’t speak to the problems on a phone, but I’ll tell you that those problems don’t exist on a tablet.  I’m playing on an iPad mini, and I have had no playability issues whatsoever.  I can see how it could be an issue on a smaller screen (so be warned) but on a tablet this game is gold.

Very well developed game from what I’ve seen so far; I might lower this 5* rating if I run into huge problems with it later, but so far everything I’ve seen tells me that this is a gem.  Sad to see that the last update was three years ago, but it looks like there is plenty enough content to justify the purchase.

### 5/5 — Massive Damage

*2021-01-20, version 1.4.2.6*

Massive Damage has put out my 2 favorite games on the AppStore. 1. Please Stay calm(Bring it back) and 2. Halcyon 6!!!! I’m a Console gamer but I’ve been having so much fun playing this game that no other entertainment matters anymore. All jokes aside you are my favorite game developer. Please put out more content at the same level of quality as you always have!!!

-Big Fan

### 2/5 — Unfortunately cannot recommend

*2020-11-24, version 1.4.2.6*

I bought this game hoping it would be what other reviews stated: basically a goofy X-COM. It is much less exciting than that. Ship battles take forever, and ground battles are a joke. Cultivating your team is a huge pain because your officers are your fighters, pilots, scientists, and engineers. You never have enough resources, even if you lean hard into just acquiring them and ignoring other facets of the game. It’s a slog. The final straw has been the repeated crashes that lose all game data, forcing a hard restart. All in all, I wish I had spent this money on a real game for a console, not a cheap knockoff.

### 2/5 — Good but buggy

*2020-05-24, version 1.4.2.6*

Game is really enjoyable. I can’t believe how much time I spend playing. But there are flaws. The interface isn’t perfect as has been pointed out on many reviews. You will often try to start a task and end up selecting an officer by accident negating everything you were trying to do. The start task menu is too close to the select officer menu which leads to that problem. Sending out fleets takes some getting used to but I’d actually leave that as is. The other problems are major slowdown & occasional crashing. Despite the update that supposedly fixed this issue it still happens. The slowdown becomes really problematic after playing half an hour or so. It’s borderline unplayable after awhile. I still enjoy the game and hope these issues are fixed but it’s been 2 years without an update so I’m worried game has been abandoned. The game is highly entertaining but crashes are game destroyingly frustrating. If devs ever update & actually fix the bugs I will revise my rating

### 3/5 — Needs tweaks

*2020-04-05, version 1.4.2.6*

The game is a lot of fun and I played it a whole bunch like 5 hours in one day, but there’s little things like how hard it is to make your officers do things because when you try to click confirm do that action the game always thinks your clicking on an officers portrait and takes u to their skills. It’s so frustrating when you try clicking confirm 11 times and it takes u to the officers skills again no matter how hard u try. I don’t even use those buttons very often why do they have to be so sensitive of buttons. I also can’t decide if I like the dialogues like they can be funny but every race acts like literal retards. Over all though a pretty good game and I don’t regret buying it, but the skills thing is probably gonna make me rage quit playing soon cause clicking the confirm button is how u do everything from moving fleets to building rooms in the base, but I hate having to attempt to do that 5 times at least every time I want to do something.

### 3/5 — Fun game  overall but the UI is bad enough to hamper enjoyment

*2020-02-17, version 1.4.2.6*

I love the concept, and it’s a nice combo of mechanics that I enjoy. The x-com style base building is fun, and I like that it’s a full game for one purchase.

BUT, as others seem to have noted, the UI is rather poor. It might work better on a tablet, but if you’re going to charge this much for a game and sell it for phones, you need to put more work into making it playable. The officer select area at the bottom of the screen is ridiculous. It’s straight up impossible to select some of the options at the bottom of pop up windows like the officer skill trees, because it selects an officer and kicks me out of what I’m doing, even if my finger isn’t even touching the officer selection. The hitbox on that button is way too huge, and it should not be prioritized over windows that are opened on top of it.

It’s frustrating enough that it has frankly made me want to stop playing the game. It’s a complaint that I noticed when reading reviews before purchase, but it’s hard to understand just how constant and annoying it is before you’ve experienced it yourself. Since you’ve already got my money, and this is a two year old game, I’ll just have to remember and avoid this developer in the future if this does not get fixed.

### 2/5 — Constantly crashes.

*2020-01-31, version 1.4.2.6*

Crashes all the time. I want to love this game, have it on my computer and supported it way back when on Kickstarter. However it’s unplayable at this point. I have an iPhone that’s less than one year old so performance should not be a problem.  

Glitchy UI as well. Bottom row of officer skills on level up skill selection can’t be selected as it will just pop you back out into the world (too close to officer portraits). 

I’m pretty sure they will fix this with an update but right now it’s not playable. Sorry folks.

## Frequently asked questions about Halcyon 6

### What is Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander about?

This is a space strategy RPG where players reclaim a derelict starbase. The goal is to rebuild the base, research new technologies, manage crew, and engage in tactical combat to defend against an alien invasion.

### What are the key features of the game?

Key features include base building to enhance capabilities, exploration of star clusters with your fleets, crew management for efficiency, deep tactical ship and ground combat, and emergent story events with multiple choice outcomes.

### How much does Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander cost?

The application is a paid game. The Lightspeed Edition includes the base game and all previously released additional content, along with optimizations and new features.

### What platforms is this game available on?

This application is designed for mobile devices. The description mentions it is an enhanced version of an award-winning PC game, suggesting a strong PC heritage.

### What kind of gameplay can I expect?

You can expect a blend of base building, resource management, exploration, diplomacy, and turn-based tactical combat. The game offers an emergent storytelling experience influenced by player choices and in-game criteria.

## Version history (last 1 release)

### 1.4.2.6 — 2018-02-13

This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.

Thank you for your ratings and reviews, making us App Store's Game of the Day!
Your support helps us to continually improve the game!

- Fixed stability issues caused by frequent reloading
- Various optimization improvements

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-06-10.*